>>8854881To expand on the other anon
>Thomas as a series has been labeled as boy-focused for years due to the disparity between male/female engines (Back when they were adapting the books it was something like 12 males for every 1 female)>Wokedom becomes more commonplace in media in general, Mattel decides to follow suit with Thomas & Friends>The Steam Team (Basically the core cast) at the time consisted of Thomas/Edward/Henry/Gordon/James/Percy/Emily>The logical choice is to balance out the gender ratio more instead of it being 6 to 1, the only problem comes with deciding who to remove>Thomas is the star of the show, Percy, James, and Gordon are all popular, and Emily is a girl so they're left with Edward and Henry to remove (Not that Edward and Henry aren't popular or anything, they're just the least popular of the group)>Edward gets a whole season finale to explain why he's moving to a different part of the island, Henry leaving is basically the train equivalent of "I must go now, my planet needs me">While this is happening, the yearly Thomas movie is about him going on a world tour meeting all sorts of trains from different countries along the way. One train is Nia (The orange one) from Kenya. She befriends Thomas and joins him on Sodor>The other new train is Rebecca (The yellow one), whose basic character concept is just that she's a clumsy girl >In the newer seasons alongside episodes that take place on Sodor, you have episodes of Thomas exploring various countries, interacting with local engines >This would be a fine concept if not that these episodes are heavily stereotyped (IE the Brazil episode has a carnival, the Indian episodes are about Bollywood and Tigers, and so on)Imagine if Star Trek TNG had a season where they wrote off Data and Geordi since they needed to be on a different part of the ship and replaced them with two Wesleys, while Picard had random holodeck adventures every other episode. That's basically whats happened to Thomas.
